If there where several countries in Europe occupied by Iran, with drone-strikes and a decade-long war, and then some terrorist-attack succeeded in blowing up a police-station where local people where being recruited to help the occupants, do you suppose some people would celebrate that ?

If someone, in that situation, set off a bomb on a vegetable-market in Bagdad, do you suppose someone might cheer ?

Sounds to me like you're agreeing vigorously: extremists willing to use violence exist in both christianity and islam, but are more prevalent in islam.

The statistics obviously differ by region. In the middle-east, where there's basically civil war, there's a shitload of terrorism carried out by muslims - some of those are for political reasons, and some for religious reasons.

But we already knew that living in a war-zone is dangerous, and that's not terribly relevant if you live in North-America or Europe, like most Slashdot-commenters do.

In Europe, the most common type of terrorist-attack is one motivated by separatism. Islamist attacks are a valid concern even here, but they're a tiny concern. How many people did islamists kill in USA over the last 5 years ?

True. But it's also true that the average muslim is considerably more conservative than the average christian. Infact if a christian held views as medieval as those of the average muslim, we'd call him an extremism: his position really would be extreme in the christian church.

For example, the pope was an extremist. His views where more extreme than the views of 95% of catholics, and 97% of christians.

I don't think we'll hit a singularity, no. But yes, I think that we'll see a lot of progress, more than we have in the previous 50 years.

You're right that a lot of things happened even 1913-1963. Now you do the same thing for 1713-1763. I think you'll find you agree with my claim that progress is speeding up. Precisely how -much- it speeds up, we can debate.

Transportation is *tons* faster. No, not *every* type of transport over *every* conceivable route, but on the average, things have improved a lot. Roads have improved quite a bit, and air-travel have become extremely much cheaper, thus while 50 years ago people would spend 15 hours driving Stavanger to Trondheim, today they take a plane instead and spend one hour in the air, and a total of perhaps 2 - 3 hours city-centre to city-centre.

Yes, planes existed 50 years ago too, but their cost was extremely much higher thus the average person used them much more seldom.

Similarly, yes you could place a phone-call to USA from Norway 50 years ago too, just like you can today. But it's the same story: the price has dropped by 2-3 orders of magnitude thus what was a rare luxury is today something you can do for hours every day without even noticing the financial hit, if you're so inclined.

Energy ? I get 4 megawatt-hours for a days pay. How much energy did you get for a days pay 50 years ago ? Furthermore, I can do much more with that energy since my car, my house and my appliances are *much* more energy-effective.

I think the trend is to overestimate the short-term changes, while underestimating long-term actually.

And long-term gets shorter all the time. We've made more technological progress in the last 50 years than we did in the 100 before that, or the 200 before those, or the 500 before. (i.e. 1963-2013 has seen more technological progress than 1163 - 1663 did.

Nope. The sequence is kilo mega giga peta exa. exabytes in base-2 is 2^60 which is 1152921504606846976 or 15.292% more than the base-10 equivalent. If you had that, and downgraded to a base-10 drive, you'd be giving up 13.26% of your drive-capacity. (while if you upgraded, you'd gain 15.292%

Life evolves. This includes AIs. Since every item, mechanical or biological break down sooner or later, given time the life we will have is that which is capable of producing new life, or repairing the old one, faster than things break down.

Creating new life, or repairing old life, requires resources, at a minimum energy and whatever substance the intelligence is hosted in. Could be silicon, could be carbon, but it's a fair bet that it'll be -something-

Neither energy, nor matter is available in unlimited amounts, thus there'll be competition for both. You can have a intelligence that voluntarily give up both, in favor of someone else -- but if so, that intelligence would quickly find itself extinct. If human beings stopped defending ourselves against others species attempt at eating us, we'd all be dead in a week tops.

Thus you're wrong. However a intelligence is constructed, it'll need energy. "food" if you like. And it'll be limited in what it can do, by the availability of "food". (though of course the 'food' can be any source of energy, such as sunlight or radiation or wind or whatever)

you might say the human race today "eats" oil, atleast we consume energy in the form of oil in order to support our activities. That we feed the oil to our cars, rather than to our biological bodies doesn't really make much of a difference. (cars are detatchable better-legs anyway)

Not at all. BankID, the dominant form of bank-authenthication in Norway issues OTP-calculators to everyone, including average private people with a perfectly ordinary account.

As an alternative, they have a solution where the SIM-card in your mobile-phone is used by an app to authenthicate you.

In both cases the same thing is true: logging in to your bank requires knowledge of your passphrase -- but *also* physical possession of a object - so a phisher would need to get both somehow, in order to be able to impresonate you.

It might not make phishing impossible, but it does make it a lot more difficult.

What gets me, is that this has been known "forever", aslong as there's been a solid theory of capitalism, atleast.

The solution, of course, is to set a fair price on the externalities. What that price is, and how to practically evaluate, collect and distribute that money, is a difficult problem, however notice that even if the money is collected in a highly inefficient manner, it is still frequently better than the alternative.

If you want to do something that gains you $50M while costing every human being $0.05 - then the overall loss is $300M. If there was a tax on your pollution to the tune of $250M, then you'd conclude it's not worth it since the taxes are higher than your gains.

In this case, no taxes are collected, and no deal is made - but nevertheless the tax-code was useful: it prevented $300M worth of harm from taking place.

Notice that even mostly-squandered taxes is a win from the perspective of everyone-but-you.

Let's say instead you want to do something that gains you $100M, while costing the rest of humanity $25M. We tax your activity at $50M, and the inefficiency of bureacracy means half of the collected taxes are completely wasted.

End result: With the tax you gain $50M and everyone else breaks even. Without the tax, you gain $100M, and everyone else is down $25M. -- thus the tax, despite being 50% wasteful, is a net-gain for everyone except you.